Save room for some Tweezers, Olives and Seafood Apple Pie. The holiday season means festive pies are usually part of the menu. Pumpkin pie and mincemeat pie are typical desserts. But perhaps it's time to consider having a slice of Onion Cassette Pie. That particular pie idea was thought up by artificial intelligence.

In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT's famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work. Greg's essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls "a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well." In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy. Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees. Below he speaks to two key organizers: Gideon Lichfield, the editor in chief of the MIT Technology Review, and Karen Hao, its artificial intelligence reporter.

A shorter version of this article was originally published by Scientific American. With articles like these, the press will have you believe that machine learning can reliably predict whether you're gay, whether you'll develop psychosis, whether you'll have a heart attack, and whether you're a criminal – as well as other ambitious predictions such as when you'll die and whether your unpublished book will be a bestseller. Machine learning can't confidently tell such things about each individual. In most cases, these things are simply too difficult to predict with certainty. Researchers report high "accuracy," but then later reveal – buried within the details of a technical paper – that they were actually misusing the word "accuracy" to mean another measure of performance related to accuracy but in actuality not nearly as impressive.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are critical tools that data scientists have to master.

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Alibaba Cloud on Thursday released the source codes of a self-developed machine–learning platform it used to power this year's 11.11 Global …